Olaopa seeks governance role for monarchs as Obasanjo, others celebrate Olowu

The Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission, Prof. Tunji Olaopa, on Thursday, advocated giving a governance role to monarchs as he joined former President Olusegun Obasanjo and others to pay tributes to the Olowu of Owu, his Royal Majesty Oba Saka Matemilola.

The event, which took place at the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library Auditorium, Abeokuta, was the second anniversary of Prof. Matemilola’s ascension to the throne.

Olaopa, who was the chairman of the symposium held to celebrate the monarch, said that Oba Matemilola has the profundity of a professorial status that makes him an enlightened monarch carrying the weight of socio-cultural refinement and progressive improvement of his people.

According to the Professor of Public Administration, the Olowu represents a commendable growing trend in Nigeria, noting that “with the increasing number of urbane, educated, core professionals, accomplished elites and cosmopolitan modern traditional rulers all around Nigeria, we have been witnessing a resurgence of radical rulership.”

He said such rulership “is not just content with occupying a sinecure status and thereby harvesting elitist opportunism devoid of political and social capital that could be deployed to reconnect their people back to the democratic imperative in Nigeria.”

He added: “An opportunity is therefore building up with this corps of expanding demographics of exemplary leadership like the Olowu who have offered to cumulate their efforts into a bigger advocacy for enlarged influence in the governance space.

“The Olowu’s brand and its significance therefore provides a veritable reference by which we can begin to understand the modernity of tradition.”

He noted that Nigeria’s constitutional system notwithstanding, traditional institutions like the Obaship, Obis and Emirs “have roles to play which cannot be interpreted as the rude intrusion of useless traditions.”

He said that traditional rulership still wields sufficient local authority and indeed constitutes enormous cultural and political capital in a measure that “our refusal to recognise will continue to render constitutional order empty in terms of legitimacy, in spirit and in truth.”

He stressed: “As an erudite scholar and urbane professional, His Majesty the Olowu brings certain wisdom, forthrightness and pragmatism to the monarchy in ways that our constitutional framework can no longer ignore. Our country cannot therefore afford to throw away the baby of the constitutional utility … of traditional rulers and the traditional institutions under their charge with the bath water because of the endeavours of a few of custodians of traditions who are retrogressive.”

Olaopa said that these enlightened monarchs have a sense of a legacy of a sustainable model of community development and local governance that harvests the collective passion, energies and resources of people at home as well as the expatriates in the Diaspora to address the yearning of the grassroots for poverty alleviation, industrial growth and sustainable development.

“In both theories and practices, there have been efforts on the global, national and local scales to develop a framework of decentralised governance that enables the grassroots to develop, own and participate in its own methods of development and local governance that is driven internally.

“At the local level, I like to mention two initiatives to underscore the critical role of sustainable development and its possibility.

“The first is the home-grown OPTICOM (optimum community) model through the theoretical and practical efforts of the late Professors Ojetunji Aboyade and Akinlawon Mabogunje.

“The second initiative that speaks to local governance is the Ijebu Development Initiative on Poverty Reduction (IDIPR), whose theoretical inspiration is Prof. Mabogunje, and whose motivational patron is Oba (Dr) Sikiru Kayode Adetona, the Awujale of Ijebuland.

“With the two good practices, there is no other evidence that is needed as to the possibility of connecting traditional institutions at the grassroots to sustainable development as a model of local governance that instigates democratic governance,” he said.

Lauding the courage, accomplishment and a sense of equity that are associated with the Owu royalty, Olaopa said no other personality embodies this historical character than “the iconic statesman-emeritus himself, the Baba of Nigeria, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, whose socio-cultural and national persona, both as a statesman and a warrior earned him the title of Balogun of Owu. It is with a deep sense of pride, therefore, that I always trumpet my association with Baba Obasanjo as a father, a statesman, a warrior and a trailblazer in Nigeria’s political development.”